A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: The first atomic bomb is detonated The first atomic bomb is detonated 1945 Photo: Atomic bomb test explosion in Alamagordo, New Mexico, July 16, 1945. AP/Wide World Photos In 1932, James Chadwick discovered the neutron , a small atomic particle with mass but no charge. This turned out to be an extremely useful tool for bombarding atomic nuclei. Two years later, Enrico Fermi bombarded uranium with neutrons, hoping that it would cause the uranium to emit a beta particle and become a new, artificial element above uranium in the periodic table. It seemed he had done this and in the process showed that slow-moving neutrons were more effective than high-energy neutrons for the task. Fermi won the Nobel Prize for his work in 1938. He was a committed antifascist and when he and his wife left Italy for the Nobel ceremony, it was for good. They settled in the United States. Meanwhile, Fermi's work had produced some puzzling results and physicists Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassmann, and Lise Meitner took it up in Germany.

They began to suspect that Fermi hadn't created a new element at all but might have actually split the uranium atom in two -- at that point a barely imaginable event. Before they could confirm this, Meitner -- who was an Austrian of Jewish descent -- had to flee the country when Germany annexed Austria in 1938. With the help of Niels Bohr , she got a position in Stockholm. From there, Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch proved that the uranium atom had been split. Hahn published the results in January 1939 and Meitner and Frisch published the explanation a month later, introducing the term "nuclear fission." Using Bohr's liquid drop model of the nucleus, they suggested that when split, both halves of the atom would have a positive charge and would repel each other with powerful force. The German government took little notice of the finding at first. But others felt the implications were immediately clear. Niels Bohr brought news of Meitner's discovery to the United States in 1939. Several scientists, realizing that fission could be used to build a devastating weapon, wrote to President Roosevelt to inform him.

He immediately set up a committee to research the matter. (Back in Germany, Hahn refused to do weapons research. He had worked on chemicals used as weapons in World War I. His advisers assured him it would bring a speedier end to the war, but he was horrified when he saw Russian soldiers who'd been gassed.) By the end of 1941, British studies had outlined the materials requirements for an atomic bomb and uranium research was going on at about 12 American universities. In 1942 Fermi's team at the University of Chicago created a sustained chain reaction of fission for the first time. Also during 1942, the Manhattan District of the Corps of Engineers was formed to construct three secret "cities" for major portions of atomic bomb development. At Oak Ridge, Tennessee, a nuclear reactor and plant for separating uranium 235 from natural uranium was built. In Hanford, Washington, three reactors were built to extract plutonium (another element with atoms that could be split) from a non-fissionable type of uranium. Finally a lab for the design and construction of the bomb was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. The cost of these Manhattan Project installations was $2 billion. J.

Robert Oppenheimer was made director of the Los Alamos lab, and in 1943 he gathered about 200 of the best scientists in the field to live and work there. They designed two bombs, one using uranium (called "Little Boy") and one using plutonium ("Fat Man"). By early 1945, the plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford had produced enough raw material for testing. On July 13, 1945, at a site called Trinity 100 km northwest of Alamogordo, a plutonium bomb was assembled and brought to the top of a tower. The test was postponed by thunderstorms. On July 16, the bomb was detonated, producing an intense flash of light seen by observers in bunkers 10 km away and a fireball that expanded to 600 meters in two seconds. It grew to a height of more than 12 kilometers, boiling up in the shape of a mushroom. Forty seconds later, the blast of air from the bomb reached the observation bunkers, along with a long and deafening roar of sound.

The explosive power, equivalent to 18.6 kilotons of TNT, was almost four times larger than predicted. Some of the Los Alamos scientists had circulated a petition asking President Truman to give Japan a warning and a chance to surrender before using the bomb. Some signed, some didn't, but the project remained a secret until the end. Twenty-one days after the test, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped the uranium bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later the plutonium bomb was used to bomb Nagasaki. The two bombs killed approximately 150,000 people when they fell. Earlier in the year, intense bombing of Tokyo with conventional bombs had killed about 100,000 people without causing Japan to surrender, but on August 15, 1945, Japan officially surrendered, bringing an end to World War II. After the war, hydrogen bombs and other nuclear weapons continued to be developed by the United States and its former ally the Soviet Union. The competition between the ideologically different nations led to an "arms race" that shaped the postwar decades both economically and philosophically. Nuclear fission was also put to civilian use in power generators in several countries.

They made cheap electricity and were a source of radioisotopes for other types of research, but came with their share of problems and dangers. Reactors are still in use, but in many places have fallen out of favor as an energy source. Copyright notice: The photo above is copyright protected and is the property of the Associated Press. Any use without prior written permission from AP/Wide World Photos is prohibited. Any violation will be subject to legal action. The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded - Jul 16, 1945 - HISTORY.com The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded Share this: The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded Author The first atomic bomb test is successfully exploded URL Publisher A+E Networks On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico. Plans for the creation of a uranium bomb by the Allies were established as early as 1939, when Italian emigre physicist Enrico Fermi met with U.S. Navy department officials at Columbia University to discuss the use of fissionable materials for military purposes.

That same year, Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt supporting the theory that an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction had great potential as a basis for a weapon of mass destruction. In February 1940, the federal government granted a total of $6,000 for research. But in early 1942, with the United States now at war with the Axis powers, and fear mounting that Germany was working on its own uranium bomb, the War Department took a more active interest, and limits on resources for the project were removed. Brigadier-General Leslie R. Groves, himself an engineer, was now in complete charge of a project to assemble the greatest minds in science and discover how to harness the power of the atom as a means of bringing the war to a decisive end. The Manhattan Project (so-called because of where the research began) would wind its way through many locations during the early period of theoretical exploration, most importantly, the University of Chicago, where Enrico Fermi successfully set off the first fission chain reaction. But the Project took final form in the desert of New Mexico, where, in 1943, Robert J.

Oppenheimer began directing Project Y at a laboratory at Los Alamos, along with such minds as Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, and Fermi. Here theory and practice came together, as the problems of achieving critical mass—a nuclear explosion—and the construction of a deliverable bomb were worked out. Finally, on the morning of July 16,in the New Mexico desert120 miles south of Santa Fe, the first atomic bomb was detonated. The scientists and a few dignitaries had removed themselves 10,000 yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air and generated the destructive power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT. The tower on which the bomb sat when detonated was vaporized. The question now became—on whom was the bomb to be dropped? Germany was the original target, but the Germans had already surrendered. The only belligerent remaining was Japan. A footnote: The original $6,000 budget for the Manhattan Project finally ballooned to a total cost of $2 billion. Related Videos The Manhattan Project [ushistory.org] 51f.

The Manhattan Project This once classified photograph features the first atomic bomb — a weapon that atomic scientists had nicknamed "Gadget." The nuclear age began on July 16, 1945, when it was detonated in the New Mexico desert. Early in 1939, the world's scientific community discovered that German physicists had learned the secrets of splitting a uranium atom. Fears soon spread over the possibility of Nazi scientists utilizing that energy to produce a bomb capable of unspeakable destruction. Scientists Albert Einstein, who fled Nazi persecution, and Enrico Fermi, who escaped Fascist Italy, were now living in the United States. They agreed that the President must be informed of the dangers of atomic technology in the hands of the Axis powers. Fermi traveled to Washington in March to express his concerns on government officials. But few shared his uneasiness. Leaving nothing to chance, Los Alamos atomic scientists conducted a pre-test test in May 1945 to check the monitoring instruments. A 100-ton bomb was exploded some 800 yards from the Trinity site where Gadget would be detonated a few weeks later.

Einstein penned a letter to President Roosevelt urging the development of an atomic research program later that year. Roosevelt saw neither the necessity nor the utility for such a project, but agreed to proceed slowly. In late 1941, the American effort to design and build an atomic bomb received its code name — the Manhattan Project. At first the research was based at only a few universities — Columbia University, the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley. A breakthrough occurred in December 1942 when Fermi led a group of physicists to produce the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the grandstands of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Enrico Fermi, a physicist who left fascist Italy for America, encouraged the U.S. to begin atomic research. The result was the top-secret "Manhattan Project." After this milestone, funds were allocated more freely, and the project advanced at breakneck speed. Nuclear facilities were built at Oak Ridge, Tennessee and Hanford, Washington. The main assembly plant was built at Los Alamos, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer was put in charge of putting the pieces together at Los Alamos.

After the final bill was tallied, nearly $2 billion had been spent on research and development of the atomic bomb. The Manhattan Project employed over 120,000 Americans. Secrecy was paramount. Neither the Germans nor the Japanese could learn of the project. Roosevelt and Churchill also agreed that the Stalin would be kept in the dark. Consequently, there was no public awareness or debate. Keeping 120,000 people quiet would be impossible; therefore only a small privileged cadre of inner scientists and officials knew about the atomic bomb's development. In fact, Vice-President Truman had never heard of the Manhattan Project until he became President Truman. Although the Axis powers remained unaware of the efforts at Los Alamos, American leaders later learned that a Soviet spy named Klaus Fuchs had penetrated the inner circle of scientists. This crater in the Nevada desert was created a 104 kiloton nuclear bomb buried 635 feet beneath the surface. It is the result of a 1962 test investigating whether nuclear weapons could be used to excavate canals and harbors. By the summer of 1945, Oppenheimer was ready to test the first bomb.

On July 16, 1945, at Trinity Site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, scientists of the Manhattan Project readied themselves to watch the detonation of the world's first atomic bomb. The device was affixed to a 100-foot tower and discharged just before dawn. No one was properly prepared for the result. A blinding flash visible for 200 miles lit up the morning sky. A mushroom cloud reached 40,000 feet, blowing out windows of civilian homes up to 100 miles away. When the cloud returned to earth it created a half-mile wide crater metamorphosing sand into glass. A bogus cover-up story was quickly released, explaining that a huge ammunition dump had just exploded in the desert. Soon word reached President Truman in Potsdam, Germany that the project was successful. The world had entered the nuclear age.

United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb - Jul 16, 1945 - HISTORY.com United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb Share this: United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb Author United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb URL Publisher A+E Networks The United States conducts the first test of the atomic bomb at at the Trinity bomb site in central New Mexico. The terrifying new weapon would quickly become a focal point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. The official U.S. development of the atomic bomb began with the establishment of the Manhattan Project in August 1942. The project brought together scientists from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to study the feasibility of building an atomic bomb capable of unimaginable destructive power. The project proceeded with no small degree of urgency, since the American government had been warned that Nazi Germany had also embarked on a program to develop an atomic weapon. By July 1945, a prototype weapon was ready for testing. Although Germany had surrendered months earlier, the war against Japan was still raging. On July 16, the first atomic bomb was detonated in the desert near the Los Alamos research facility. Dr. J.

Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, watched the mushroom cloud rise into the New Mexico sky. “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” he uttered, reciting a passage from an ancient Hindu text. News of the successful test was relayed to President Harry S. Truman, who was meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Potsdam to discuss the postwar world. Observers at the meeting noted that the news “tremendously pepped up” the president, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed that Truman almost immediately adopted a more aggressive tone in dealing with Stalin. Truman and many other U.S. officials hoped that possession of the atomic bomb would be America’s trump card in dealing with the Soviets after the war. Use of the weapon against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 demonstrated the destructive force of the atomic bomb. The American atomic monopoly did not last long, though. By 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb, marking the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Related Videos First Atomic Bomb Test Exposed U.S. Civilians to Radiation First Atomic Bomb Test Exposed U.S.

Civilians to Radiation By Ker Than | July 16, 2007 08:35am ET MORE The only color photograph available for the Trinity blast, taken by Los Alamos scientist and amateur photographer Jack Aeby from near Base Camp. As Aeby later said, "It was there so I shot it." Credit: Jack Aeby The world’s first atomic bomb test might have exposed unaware civilians in New Mexico to thousands of times the recommended level of public radiation exposure, according to reconstructed data in a new study. The research, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), found that ingestion of radioactive materials—primarily from irradiated rainwater and goat’s milk—might have been a substantial contributor to public radiation exposure that was largely not accounted for. The findings come on the 62nd anniversary of the world’s first atomic explosion and were presented at the recent annual meeting of the Health Physics Society. ‘Trinity’ The world’s first nuclear weapons test took place on July 16, 1945 in the desolate White Sands deserts of New Mexico. In a cryptic reference to a John Donne poem that he knew and loved, J.

Robert Oppenheimer, lead physicist of the Manhattan Project and scientific director of the test, dubbed the location “Trinity.” At 5:29:45 a.m. local time, a plutonium-based atomic bomb was detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower erected at Trinity specifically for the test. Scientists hoped that exploding the bomb at an elevated height would reduce the amount of radioactive dust raised by the explosion. They also needed to simulate the air-drop method of deployment that was eventually used by the real bombs. The Trinity bomb was an exact replica of “Fat Man,” the second and last nuclear weapon ever used in war. Fat Man was detonated over Nagasaki, Japan less than a month after the Trinity test. Exploding with an energy equal to about 20 kilotons of TNT, the blast carved a crater in the Earth more than 1,000 feet wide and 10 feet deep. Radioactive fallout from the blast was detected as far away as Indiana. Heat from the explosion was so intense that sand grains fused to form a reflective layer of radioactive, green glass, called “Trinitite,” on the desert floor.

Dangerous radiation Because of its importance in the war , the Trinity test was conducted in secret. Little was known about the dangers of radiation exposure in the 1940s, so local residents were not warned or evacuated in advance of—or even following—the test. As a result, people in surrounding areas were exposed to radiation by breathing contaminated air, eating contaminated foods, and drinking affected water and milk. Some ranches were located within 15 miles of ground zero, and commercial crops were grown nearby. In the hours after the blast, five monitoring teams traveled along local roads recording radiation levels. The highest radiation levels from Trinity were measured in a swath 12 miles long and one mile wide that started near an area 16 miles northeast of ground zero. Around nearby ranches, exposure rates around 15 Roentgen per hour were measured just three hours after detonation. Currently, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission states that members of the public should not receive more than 2 millirem (about 0.002 Roentgen) of radiation in any one hour from external radiation sources in any public area. The exposure rates following the Trinity test were more than 10,000 times this recommended dose level. T.E.

Widner, the director of the new CDC study, said he thinks evacuations would have certainly been arranged if scientists and physicians had known about the long-term effects of radiation exposure, even if the publicity threatened the mission. Trinity is now open twice a year to the public, on the first Saturdays of April and October for six hours each time. According to the public affairs office at White Sands, a one-hour visit to ground zero will result in a whole body exposure of one-half to one millirem. To put this in perspective, a U.S. adult receives 360 millirems on average every year from natural and medical sources. Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth Labs Compete to Make New Nuclear Bomb Author Bio Ker Than, Ker was a staff reporter for Live Science and Space.com and has freelanced for various outlets, including New Scientist and Popular Science. He has degrees from the University of California, Irvine and New York University, including a masters degree in science journalism. Ker Than, on Nuclear Blasts in Mississippi | Mississippi History Now Location of nuclear tests site in Mississippi. Map courtesy the U.S. Department of Energy . Henry G. Vermillion, office of information director, U.S.

Atomic Energy Commission, indicates evacuation area for the 1964 nuclear test site. Moncrief Photograph Collection, Item #180, Mississippi Department of Archives and History . Some residents stabilize chimneys, porches, and outbuildings in anticipation of the blast. Moncrief Photograph Collection, Item #197, Mississippi Department of Archives and History . Crowds gather a distance from the Tatum Salt Dome nuclear test site on October 22, 1964. Moncrief Photograph Collection, Item #183, Mississippi Department of Archives and History . Horace Burge, who lived about two miles from the site, came home after the Salmon test to find shattered dishes, and a damaged fireplace and chimney. Moncrief Photograph Collection, Item #261, Mississippi Department of Archives and History . Nuclear Blasts in Mississippi Stephen Cresswell At 10:00 a.m. on October 22, 1964, the United States government detonated an underground nuclear device in Lamar County, in south Mississippi. Residents there felt three separate shocks, and watched as the soil rose and behaved like ocean waves.

Hunting dogs howled in terror, and two miles from the test site the blast shook pecans off the pecan trees. This nuclear test, and the one that followed two years later at the same Mississippi site, were the only nuclear explosions on U.S. soil east of the Rocky Mountain states. Atomic bombs were in the news in October 1964. Only one week before the Mississippi nuclear test, newspapers had reported that Communist China had detonated its first atomic bomb. For residents in Lamar County, however, no news story was watched more closely than the plans for nuclear testing in Mississippi. Background of Nuclear Testing The world’s first nuclear test came during World War II at Alamogordo, a remote location in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945. Three weeks after this successful test, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, one over Hiroshima and one over Nagasaki, killing some 220,000 residents of those cities and leading to Japan’s surrender. President Harry S. Truman defended his decision to use nuclear bombs by saying that he hoped the bombs would convince Japan to surrender.

Ironically, after World War II was over, the United States became allied with its former World War II enemies, but became locked in a bitter Cold War with its former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. Four years after America’s first testing of a nuclear device, the Soviets tested their first bomb. In the coming years, the United States built some 70,000 nuclear warheads, and the Soviet Union vowed to build a similar number. By the time of the nuclear testing in Mississippi in 1964, Great Britain, France, and China had joined “the nuclear club.” As a part of the rivalry between Communist and non-Communist nations during the Cold War, nuclear experts developed new types of nuclear weapons, and insisted that it was necessary to test these new designs. Many citizens around the world, however, expressed concern that such testing would lead to medically harmful “fallout” — radioactive particles that would drift to earth and enter people’s bodies, potentially causing leukemia and other diseases. In 1963, the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union signed a Partial Test Ban Treaty, agreeing not to test nuclear devices in the atmosphere or under water.

The treaty did not address underground testing, because of disagreements and uncertainty over how to verify that nations were not testing weapons underground. Project Dribble A number of nuclear testing experts said it was not a good idea to prohibit underground testing, because some nations might cheat by secretly testing nuclear weapons underground. In most cases, seismographs (the device used to measure earthquakes) could detect underground nuclear tests. The United States wanted to know more about underground testing and how it could be detected, and designed Project Dribble, which included the two Mississippi detonations, to investigate the possibility that cheating nations could hide their underground tests in some way. Nuclear scientists investigated several potential test sites in Mississippi, but finally selected a site just north of Baxterville in Lamar County, about 28 miles southwest of Hattiesburg. Geologically, the area was called the Tatum Salt Dome, a vast supply of dense salt located about 1,000 feet below ground level. Salt domes deep beneath the surface of south central Mississippi are the dried remains of a sea that covered much of the state in the Mesozoic Era. The plan was to detonate one nuclear bomb about 2,700 feet down, in solid salt.

This would be the 1964 blast, code-named Project Salmon. It was believed Project Salmon would blast a huge cavity in the salt. Then the second blast, Project Sterling, would involve detonating a smaller nuclear bomb inside the cavity left in the salt by Project Salmon. Scientists believed that because the bomb would be detonated in a cavity rather than in solid rock, the shock waves would be muffled and the test might not be detectable by seismographs and other measuring devices. So in 1964 officials of the Atomic Energy Commission came to Mississippi and began preparing the Tatum Salt Dome site for Project Salmon. A hundred Lamar County residents found work at the site, primarily driving trucks and heavy equipment, or providing food for the project employees. The nuclear test was scheduled for September 22, 1964, but the wind direction was not right until October 22. On that date about 400 residents were evacuated from the area, and were paid $10 per adult and $5 per child for their inconvenience. The zone from which citizens were evacuated stretched five miles downwind of ground zero, and about half that distance in directions that were not downwind of the test.

Click here to see the Mississippi segment from the Peter Kuran film “Atomic Journeys.” (YouTube site accessed July 2008.) Most residents later reported that the shock of the explosion was much stronger than they had been led to believe. The editor of the Hattiesburg American , although almost thirty miles away, reported that he felt the newspaper building sway for nearly three minutes. At the test site, creeks ran black with silt-laden water, and by seven days after the blast, more than 400 nearby residents had filed damage claims with the government, reporting that their homes had been damaged or that their water wells had gone dry. Horace Burge lived about two miles from the site of the explosion, and returned home to his three-room house to discover considerable damage caused by the blast. The fireplace and chimney were badly damaged, and bricks littered his living room. Broken dishes and jars were all over his kitchen floor, and the shelves fell down inside his refrigerator and broke several glass containers. His electric stove was covered with ash and pieces of concrete. The pipes under his kitchen sink had burst, leading to flooding inside the house.

Within days, the United States government began reimbursing local residents for the damage done to their homes. After the blast, reporters from the Hattiesburg American interviewed many local residents who said they didn’t want this nuclear testing to be done in their neighborhoods, but who added that there was nothing they could do about it. In an editorial, the Hattiesburg American lectured its readers that such tests were necessary for the future security of the United States. After seismic analysis, the government scientists reported that Project Salmon had been a success, with the bomb delivering the same force as 5,000 tons of TNT. The Project Salmon blast was about one-third as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The bomb blasted a void in the salt as predicted, a spherical cavity that was about 110 feet in diameter. The Project Sterling blast, on December 3, 1966, was considerably weaker than the blast two years earlier, as it was intended to be. Instead of the force of 5,000 tons of TNT that Project Salmon had developed, Project Sterling’s bomb had the force of 350 tons of TNT.

Observers two miles away from the blast reported they barely felt a bump. Like Project Salmon, Project Sterling was labeled a success. Because it was detonated in a cavity in the salt, its force, as measured by seismographs, was about 100 times weaker than would have been expected with the same sized bomb placed in solid rock or salt. Thus U.S. government officials reported that Mississippi’s two nuclear blasts, as a part of Project Dribble, helped prove that in fact the seismic effect of a nuclear blast could be greatly reduced if such a blast were set off in a large cave. This suggested it might be possible for a nation to cheat on a future nuclear test ban by hiding a nuclear test. It also helped teach atomic scientists how to detect and measure such hidden blasts. Though Mississippi’s part in nuclear testing was over by 1966, the Tatum Salt Dome site did see two additional tests by the Atomic Energy Commission as a part of Project Miracle Play. Project Miracle Play was similar to Project Dribble in that it too was designed to detect underground testing, but this time the two blasts were conventional bombs instead of nuclear.

Mississippi’s two explosions in Project Miracle Play in 1969 and 1970 were fueled by a mixture of oxygen and methane. After the 1960s Since the 1960s, much has changed. The United States has reduced its nuclear stockpile considerably, to about 10,000 warheads, and Britain and France have also reduced their stockpiles. The Cold War has ended, and few nations remain Communist. The former Soviet Union split apart, and the nation of Russia inherited the nuclear warheads that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union. These Russian nuclear stockpiles are considerably smaller than those during the height of the Cold War. The United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since 1992, and the other major nations of the world have also gone years without nuclear testing, or planning any nuclear tests for the future. On the other hand, the United States expresses concern that nations such as Iran might soon develop and test nuclear weapons, or that a terrorist group might turn to nuclear warfare, including possibly a conventional bomb that would spread radioactive material.

Further, North Korea claims to have detonated a nuclear bomb in 2006, though some claim this small explosion was not really a successful nuclear test. And, in July 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that North Korea had shut down its nuclear weapons-making nuclear reactor. Aside from the possibility that the enemies of the United States might obtain nuclear weapons, many citizens express concern that even if new nations, or groups, do not develop nuclear weapons, the world will always be in danger of nuclear explosions because 36,000 atomic bombs still exist. Health and safety at Tatum Salt Dome With any nuclear test there is the danger of health problems developing among the people and other living things near the test site. At the Mississippi nuclear test site, one fear in 1964 was that these underground explosions would “blow out” during the tests, sending dirt, gasses, and radioactive material high into the air. Government officials said this was unlikely, pointing out that the 2,700-foot shaft had been filled with gravel and an enormous concrete plug. After the 1964 blast, scientists reassured Mississippians by reporting that all radiation had been contained underground.

They said the soil, water, and air in the area was not made radioactive. Unfortunately, the site did become contaminated after the blast. Two months after the 1964 test, nuclear researchers drilled a hole down into the void left by the blast in order to lower instruments into the cavity. In drilling the hole, the drill bit brought radioactive soil and water up to the surface. The same thing happened in 1966. Several times the U.S. government came in to attempt to clean up the Tatum Salt Dome site. In 1972, buildings at the site were bulldozed and sent to the government’s Nevada Test Site, where considerable radioactive material was already in storage. Most of the other radioactive material at the Tatum Salt Dome site (primarily soil, rock, and water) were put back down into the test cavity, where it remains today in solid or sludge form. Some of the radioactive liquids were injected into “Aquifer Number 5,” a vein of salty water located about 2,500 feet underground at the Tatum Salt Dome site. U.S.

government officials erected a large stone monument at the site, with a brass plaque warning future generations not to drill or dig in the vicinity of this test site. Some Lamar County residents complained of lingering health effects in the decades after the blast. Some argued that the number of cancer deaths in the Tatum Salt Dome area is higher than national averages. Federal officials maintain that there is no health risk associated with living near the Tatum Salt Dome site, but the government did pay at least one former Mississippi employee of Project Dribble for unspecified health damages. Around 2000, the government built a water pipeline to help residents near the Tatum Salt Dome get drinking water from far away from the test site, in hopes of calming residents’ fears about their drinking water. On to the future Most Lamar County residents have already forgotten Mississippi’s two nuclear explosions, and younger citizens of Mississippi typically have never heard of Project Dribble. The debate about the future of nuclear weapons, though, will continue.

Many people will argue that nuclear weapons are an important part of a diversified defense strategy for the nations that possess them, while others believe that nuclear weapons make the world a very unsafe place, with the potential to wreak tremendous harm to the environment and to end human society as we know it. Stephen Cresswell, Ph.D., is professor of history at West Virginia Wesleyan College and the author of an earlier Mississippi History Now article, “Was Mississippi a Part of Progressivism?” He is the author of Rednecks, Redeemers, and Race: Mississippi after Reconstruction, 1877-1917, a book in the Mississippi Historical Society’s Mississippi Heritage Series . New Mexico Office of the State Historian | people Detonation of the First Atomic Bomb at the Trinity Site, 1945 By Michael Ann Sullivan On 16 July 1945 the U.S. Army and civilian scientists attached to the Manhattan Engineering District detonated the first atomic device in the New Mexico desert at Trinity Site, a remote location sixty miles northwest of Alamogordo. At 5:30 am in the morning a brilliant fireball rose into the air and lit the pre-dawn sky with the brightness of sunrise.

A mushroom shaped cloud billowed 38,000 feet into the air and all animal and plant life vaporized from the site. Despite this awesome sight, few people, other than those involved in the test, witnessed the blast and those that did failed to guess at its significance. Newspaper coverage that day did not enlighten the public. Pre-wrote press releases claimed that an ammunition magazine accidentally exploded on the Alamogordo Air Base. The Trinity test affirmed Manhattan Project scientists’ efforts to develop an atomic weapon ahead of the Germans during World War II (WWII). The United States entered the field of atomic research at the urging of Albert Einstein and Leo Szilzard two émigré physicists that escaped Nazi Germany. In 1939, Einstein and Szilzard wrote a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him about German research into nuclear fission and its possible uses. Roosevelt responded by creating an Advisory Committee on Uranium. The Uranium Committee funded the first U.S. atomic research. After the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. atomic program expanded rapidly.

Roosevelt established a National Defense Research Committee (NDRC) and the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) to mobilize science for the war effort. In 1942, a NDRC report suggested that an atomic weapon could be developed in time to influence the outcome of the war. Roosevelt then created the Manhattan Engineering District (MED), a top-secret agency under the direction of General Leslie R. Groves to develop and produce an atomic bomb for use during the war. Groves immediately began selecting sites and personnel to conduct the research necessary to achieve this outcome. Groves picked Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington, as the locations for the production of nuclear materials. Groves demanded utter secrecy. Each facility of the Manhattan Project knew only what that site was working on and nothing else. Groves met J. Robert Oppenheimer, a theoretical physicist, at the University of Berkeley, in October of 1942.

Oppenheimer challenged Groves’ practice of compartmentalization and suggested the need for a central laboratory to combine all areas of research—“chemical, physical, metallurgic, engineering, and ordnance.” Groves agreed that a laboratory for research and development would be a boon to the project and selected Oppenheimer to lead it. Although an established and accomplished theoretical physicist, Oppenheimer had no previous administrative experience. Moreover, his left-leaning politics made many in Washington nervous. Nevertheless, Groves found Oppenheimer to be both brilliant and trustworthy and recommended him for the post. Oppenheimer accepted and began touring the country recruiting eminent scientists and engineers to work on the many problems associated with creating an atomic weapon. Many of the civilian scientists that accepted Oppenheimer’s proposal had escaped from Nazi Germany or other fascist regimes in Europe. The brightest minds in physics—Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Emilio Segrè, Stanlislaw Ulum, Edward Teller, I. I. Rabi, Hans Bethe, and John von Nuemann agreed to join Oppenheimer in his new central laboratory.

Groves required a remote location for the facility, west of the Mississippi, and located in a natural bowl so that the perimeter could be fenced and guarded. Several sites in the Southwest were selected but neither suited Oppenheimer. He then suggested the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys which he knew about from previous vacations in New Mexico. The government quickly appropriated the school and twenty-six other properties from local inhabitants. Combined with already government owned land, the Hill, as Los Alamos came to be called, eventually comprised some 9,000 acres. The M. M. Sundt Construction Company and the architectural firm of New Mexico state architect W.C. Kruger began immediately to transform the rustic boy’s school into a military base. In early 1943 work began on the main MED mission—“to produce a practical military weapon in the form of a bomb”, or gadget, as the device began to be called, by the release of energy due to a “neutron chain reaction.” The Site Y (the code name for Los Alamos) scientists pursued two promising avenues of weapon development, a gun-type uranium enriched weapon (Little Boy) and an implosion plutonium weapon (Fat Man).

The gun-type weapon operated simply by colliding two ends of a gun barrel, one with a detonator and the other with enriched uranium, causing a fission reaction and explosion. The plutonium weapon was more complex. It operated by detonating shaped conventional explosives surrounding a pit of plutonium. This explosion increasingly compressed the plutonium eventually causing a critical mass and a sustained nuclear chain reaction. Scientists felt assured that the Little Boy weapon would work without prior testing, but wanted to ascertain whether the Fat Man bomb would work as theorized. Therefore, in the spring of 1944, just as Germany had surrendered, Oppenheimer, Groves, and Kenneth T. Bainbridge (selected to oversee the test) began to look for an appropriate site to test the implosion type weapon. The test site had to be close to Los Alamos yet remote from any population centers both for reasons of safety and secrecy. The search soon narrowed to three sites, the desert training area north of Rice, California, where General Patton had trained his troops, the rugged lava beds outside of Grants, New Mexico, and the northwest corner of the Alamogordo Air Base also located in New Mexico.

The team selected the Bombing Range which lay within the historical region of the Jornada del Muerto, a desolate ninety-mile stretch of desert between present day Socorro and El Paso. The “Route of the Dead Man” or “Journey of Death” plagued early Spanish settlers as its waterless trail claimed many lives. The route became an integral part of the Camino Real, the main road from Mexico City through El Paso, Texas and into New Mexico. However, well into the nineteenth century travelers cautioned one another to cross this desert with care. By the 1940s, the area still had few permanent residents. Only a small number of hardy ranchers made this barren region at the base of the Sierra Oscuro mountains their home. Much of the land was owned by the federal government and leased out for cattle and sheep grazing. The army leased privately owned land from ninety-seven families and moved them out for the duration. However, no one has ever been able to return to their homes and the U.S. Government eventually settled with everyone who owned property in the Jornada del Muerto. The David McDonald family protested the longest and loudest claiming the U.S. Army stole their land.

McDonald even briefly re-occupied his property in 1982 until New Mexico representatives Senator Harrison Schmidt and Congressmen Joe Skeen effected a settlement between the federal government and McDonald. Oppenheimer chose the code name Trinity to designate the 51,500 acre site within the Jornado del Muerto to test the gadget. Captain Samuel P. Davalos, an engineer from Los Alamos began transforming the McDonald Ranch and surrounding area into a suitable scientific test site for the first atomic experiment. Bainbridge situated Ground Zero 3,400 yards from the McDonald Ranch house which was retrofitted to accommodate the final assembly of the nuclear device. The Army Corps of Engineers built two control bunkers close to Ground Zero and the base camp was built six miles to the south. Davalos used CCC prefabricated buildings for barracks, a latrine, the mess hall, and a laboratory at the Trinity Base Camp. The buildings were transported from near Albuquerque and reassembled on site. Campaña Hill, an overlook north of Ground Zero, was chosen as a spot for VIPs to witness the results of the test.

Initially, the site was built to house 160 men but at its height 300 men claimed the Trinity Site as their temporary home. Test personnel began arriving in March of 1945. Everyday life at Trinity was rigorous and rustic. Buildings were constructed for strength not comfort. Summer temperatures were extreme and the environment dusty and dry. The only air conditioning was in the mess hall and workers only enjoyed it for an hour a day during lunch. As befit the history of the Jornada, water was at a premium. The existing wells produced water with extremely high gypsum content. Even the installation of water filters did little to improve its potability. Rattlesnakes, scorpions, and insects of all kinds constantly strayed into barracks and mess. Technicians and scientists worked at a feverish pace to set the test up by the July deadline. The work day began at 5:00 am and continued until 3:00 pm. Work days lasting 18 hours were not uncommon. As the test date approached, the crew began to go without sleep in order to take care of last minute problems. In off hours men played pool, cards, volleyball, or hunted game to add variety to the menu.

Weekly movies were shown outside, and horses originally brought to patrol the perimeter were used for playing polo. Most personnel except the scientists did not know what the purpose of their work was until the bomb exploded. Scientists conducted a simulated explosion with conventional TNT two months before the actual test to calibrate all the equipment to be used in measuring the blast. 100 tons of TNT mounted on a 20 foot tall wooden platform was detonated on May 7th with a minute amount of radioactive material. The explosion left nothing but a crater and small trace amounts of radiation. Babcock and Wilcox Steel Corporation of Barberton, Ohio, constructed a large banded steel cylinder to house the gadget. The purpose of the container, which Groves nicknamed Jumbo, was to preserve the expensive and rare plutonium if the bomb did not detonate. If the bomb worked as planned, then Jumbo would dissolve. However, as the test day approached scientists became more and more confident that the gadget would operate according to their calculations and abandoned the idea of using the container. Jumbo arrived by railroad and was placed 800 yards from Ground Zero. It survived the explosion and is the only visible evidence of the experiment left at Trinity Site.

On 12 July the testing team began to assemble the bomb. Workers converted a room in the McDonald ranch house into a clean room where scientists assembled the plutonium core of the bomb. Jack Hubbard, hired as the chief meteorologist, made weather forecasts and determined the most desirable conditions for the blast. Hubbard wished to schedule the test on a day with clear skies, high visibility, low humidity, and with light winds heading steadily away from the blast site. Instead international and military events determined the date of the test, and in regards to the weather, only the winds cooperated with the scientists that day. On the day of the test at 5:10 am, the countdown for the Trinity test began as a spirited recording of the “Star Spangled Banner” played in the background. In preparation for the blast, men lay face down on the ground with their eyes covered and their hands over their faces. After the blast occurred, they were allowed to stand up and watch the explosion through a pair of welder’s glasses. At exactly 5:30 am the blast occurred as planned. Witnesses saw a blinding flash of light brighter than any witnessed to date in human history.

The light was so bright, that Georgia Green, a young blind woman being driven to the University of New Mexico for her morning class along Highway 85, queried her brother-in-law about the flash. The blast created a flash, then a fireball, and lastly a mushroom shaped cloud that sucked thousands of tons of sand and dirt into its mouth. Heat accompanied the light and a tremendous shock wave followed the explosion. The atomic bomb vaporized all plant and animal life within a mile radius. The area was covered with smoke and the stench of death. The other scientists and personnel witnessing the blast expressed a variety of emotions: relief, elation, awe, and trepidation. Later, when reporters interviewed Oppenheimer, he said he felt glad that the bomb worked. He also related that at the moment of detonation the lines from the Bhagavad Gita had run through his mind, “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The successful testing of the gadget at Trinity gave the U.S. Army the go ahead to use atomic weapons to end the war. On 6 August 1945 the air force dropped Little Boy over Hiroshima, Japan killing 100,000 people and devastating the city.

Three days later on 9 August 1945 an American bomber dropped Fat Man on Nagasaki killing 140,000 civilians and annihilating that city also. Japan surrendered unconditionally on 14 August 1945. In 1965, the National Park Service asked Congress to make Trinity Site a National Historic Landmark. However, Trinity is inside the White Sands Missile Range and efforts to make it a tourist attraction seem unlikely. The Missile Range opens Trinity Site to the public twice a year in April and October. Sources Used: Groves, Leslie R. Now It Can Be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Hunner, Jon. Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community. Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Lamont, Lansing. Day of Trinity. New York: Atheneum, 1965. Loeber, Charles R. Building the Bombs: A History of the Nuclear Weapons Complex. Albuquerque, New Mexico: Sandia National Laboratories, 2002. Merlan, Thomas. Life at Trinity Base Camp.

Tularosa, NM: White Sands Missile Range, 2001. Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. Szasz, Ference Morton. The Day the Sun Rose Twice: The Story of the Trinity Site Nuclear Explosion July 16, 1945. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

Question: In which American State was the first atomic bomb detonated?
Answer: NEW MEXICO